Don't blame El Niño alone

This year's southwest monsoon has ended with a 13% deficit over the long-period average, and India is still bracing for the full impact of a 'super', or 'Godzilla', El Niño

In recent memory, the cinematic image of drought and rain could well be Lagaan (2001). Set in 1893, the film builds to a nailbiting finish: One ball left, five needed. Kachra scrambles a single, then a no-ball is called. Bhuvan swings the next delivery high; captain Andrew Russell backpedals to catch it, only to realise he’s beyond the boundary. Six runs, victory for Bhuvan’s team. On cue, rain breaks over Champaner, the fictional village where the film is set, ending the drought; “teen guna lagaan (three times the land tax)” is waived, and the British cantonment is disbanded.

 

Real history offered no such bargain. When the monsoon failed during the Great Famine of 1876-78, colonial grain exports continued, including a record wheat shipment to England under Viceroy Robert Lytton.

 

The monsoon has always carried outsized weight in India. A good one lifts farm incomes and refills reservoirs; a bad one pushes up food prices, squeezes rural wages and deepens farm debt. That brings us to 2026.

 

This year’s southwest monsoon has ended with a nearly 13 per cent deficit over the long-period average, and India is still bracing for the full impact of a “super”, or “Godzilla”, El Niño. The government has cut its foodgrain production target to 373.93 million tonnes for the 2026-27 crop year from an estimated output of 376.56 million tonnes the previous year.

 

The University of Chicago’s Climate Impact Lab projects roughly 451,000 additional heat-related deaths globally between September 2026 and February 2027, including about 15,800 in India. These are projections of excess heat-related deaths, not deaths from El Niño alone. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s September assessment gives greater-than-90 per cent odds of a very strong El Niño this winter, and 75 per cent odds that the October-December event will outstrip anything recorded since 1950. Parts of the eastern equatorial Pacific are already more than 3 degrees Celsius above normal.

 

But El Niño loads the dice; it doesn’t flip a switch. It shifts the Walker circulation eastward, cutting into rainfall that supplies 80 per cent of the subcontinent’s annual precipitation. A 132-year record shows every severe Indian drought has coincided with El Niño, but not every El Niño has produced one. Of the three “super” El Niños since 1952, the monsoon was muted in 1982 and 2015, while 1997 stayed near-normal, helped by a strong positive Indian Ocean Dipole.

 

The pattern is old. A major El Niño from 1789-95 made the monsoon fail four straight years, contributing to the Doji Bara, or “Skull”, famine of 1791-92. Historian Richard Grove puts South Asian deaths as high as 11 million. The shock was global. The river Nile’s water receded significantly. Some scholars even see a link between European crop failures and the French Revolution.

 

El Niño, however, didn’t topple the monarchy; it pushed existing grievances to a head.

 

Worse came decades later with the Great Famine, which hit Asia, South America and Africa, and triggered a famine that killed more than 50 million. India’s toll is disputed. One estimate puts it at 6.1-10.3 million. A 2020 study suggested the 1877 El Niño may not have been much stronger than that of 1982, 1997 or 2015, but the destruction of traditional water and grain storage turned drought into mass death.

 

That famine also reshaped Indian politics. The 1880 Famine Commission’s code guided relief until the 1970s, though historian David Hall-Matthews argues it served colonial “relievers” more than the relieved. Nationalists built the “drain of wealth” case around it. Dadabhai Naoroji, R C Dutt and Gopal Krishna Gokhale invoked Lord Salisbury’s 1875 admission that Indian revenue flowed out without equivalent return. The 1896-1902 famine sharpened the debate; 1899 remains India’s most severe recorded drought.

 

Historian Mike Davis puts the death toll from India’s late-Victorian famines, 1876-79 and 1896-1902, at 12.2-29.3 million in his book, Late Victorian Holocausts.

 

Culture absorbed the anxiety. In Kalidas’ Meghaduta, an exiled yaksha entrusts his message to a monsoon cloud, making rain a figure for longing and return. Premchand’s Godaan shows debt’s grip on the peasant. Neither mentions El Niño; both record a society built around one season’s arrival.

 

Zainul Abedin’s Famine Sketches and Chittaprosad Bhattacharya’s Hungry Bengal, both from 1943, turned hunger into never-to-be-forgotten images. The 1943 famine had little to do with El Niño; it was largely manmade.

 

Cinema has often returned to the theme. Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin (1953) tracks a farmer’s dispossession. Satyajit Ray’s Ashani Sanket (1973) shows the Bengal famine through rising prices and empty markets; fields stay green while people starve. Gabhricha Paus (2009) follows a Vidarbha farmer battling despair as neighbours die by suicide.

 

Peepli Live (2010) updates the debt-and-drought bind for the media age, turning a farmer’s threatened suicide into television spectacle, splashes of something that P Sainath chronicled in his 1996 book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought. Mother India (1957) placed the same hardship at a young republic’s core. Kadvi Hawa (2017) brings it closer to today: Hedu, blind and from the drought-struck Mahua village in Rajasthan, versus Gunu, a recovery agent from a flood-hit area of Odisha. Too little water, too much, both trapped.

 

That’s a more useful lens than imagining one giant disaster. This El Niño meets a country already hotter than decades ago. Poor monsoons, heat, drought and cloudbursts can now overlap, and one farmer can lose crops twice over.

 

India is far better equipped than in 1877, with wider irrigation, bigger stocks, a functioning public distribution system, faster logistics and sharper forecasting. Failed monsoons no longer mean famine. But vulnerability still hasn’t vanished.

 

From the “Skull” famine to Mahua, the lesson holds: The Pacific supplies the shock; granaries, prices and debt decide who eats.

 

Nature decides if the cloud comes. What happens when it doesn’t is up to us.

 

One last twist: Lagaan’s 1893 was a La Niña year, not El Niño.

 

 

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